non-commissioned officers and men. The men are stationed at the
veterinary hospitals, Woolwich depot, Aldershot, Bulford and the
Curragh, but when trained are available for duty under veterinary
officers at any station, and a proportion of them are employed at
the various hospitals in South Africa. Owing to their liability to
service abroad in rotation, it follows that every officer spends a
considerable portion of his service in India, Burma, Egypt or South
Africa.
Each tour abroad is five years, and the average length of
service abroad is about one-half the total. This offers a wide and
varied field for the professional activities of the corps, but naturally
entails a corresponding strain on the individuals.
Commissions as lieutenants are obtained by elimination, the candidates having
previously qualified as members of the Royal College of Veterinary
Surgeons. Promotion to captain and major is granted at five and
fifteen years' service respectively, and subsequently, by selection,
to lieutenant-colonel and colonel, as vacancies occur. The director general
has the honorary-rank of major-general.
The Indian civil veterinary department was at first recruited from the A. V . Corps, but candidates who qualified as members of India. the R.C.V.S. were subsequently granted direct appointments by the India Office, by selection. The service is paid and pensioned on the lines of the other Indian civil services, and offers an excellent professional career to those whose constitution permits them to live in the tropics. The work comprises the investigation of disease in animals and the management of studs and farms, in addition to the clinical practice which falls to the share of all veterinary surgeons.
In India there are schools for the training of natives as veterinary surgeons in Bombay, Lahore, Ajmere and Bengal. The courses extend over two and three years, and the instruction is very thorough. The professors are officers of the Indian civil veterinary department, and graduates are given subordinate appointments in that service, or find ready employment in the native cavalry or in civil life.
In the United States of America, veterinary science made very slow progress until 1884, when the Bureau of Animal Industry United States. was established in connexion with the Department of Agriculture at Washington. The immediate cause of the formation of the bureau was the urgent need by the Federal government of official information concerning the nature and prevalence of animal diseases, and of the means required to control and eradicate them, and also the necessity of having an executive agency to carry out the measures necessary to stop the spread of disease and to prevent the importation of contagion into the country, as well as to conduct investigations through which further knowledge might be obtained. In 1907 the bureau consisted of ten divisions, employing the services of 815 veterinary surgeons. It deals with the investigation, control and eradication of contagious diseases of animals, the inspection and quarantine of live stock, horse-breeding, experiments in feeding, diseases of poultry and the inspection of meat and dairy produce. It makes original investigations as to the nature, cause and prevention of communicable diseases of live stock, and takes measures for their repression, frequently in conjunction with state and territorial authorities. It prepares tuberculin and mallein, and supplies these substances free of charge to public health officers, conducts experiments with immunizing agents, and prepares vaccines, sera and antitoxins for the protection of animals against disease. It prepares and publishes reports of scientific investigations and treatises on various subjects relating to live stock. The diseases which claim most attention are Texas fever, sheep scab, cattle mange, venereal disease of horses, tuberculosis of cattle and pigs, hog cholera, glanders, anthrax, black-quarter, and parasitic diseases of cattle, sheep and horses. The effect of the work of the bureau on the health and value of farm animals and their products is well known, and the people of the United States now realize the immense importance of veterinary science.
Veterinary schools were established in New York City in 1846, Boston in 1848, Chicago in 1883, and subsequently in Kansas City and elsewhere, but these, like those of Great Britain, were private institutions. The American Veterinary College, N.Y., founded in 1875, is connected with New York University, and the N.Y. State Veterinary College forms a department of Cornell University at Ithaca. Other veterinary schools attached to state universities or agricultural colleges are those in Philadelphia. Pa.; Columbus, Ohio; Ames, Iowa; Pullman, Washington; Auburn, Alabama; Manhattan, Kansas: and Fort Collins, Colorado. Other veterinary colleges are in San Francisco; Washington, D.C. (two); Grand Rapids, Michigan; St Joseph, Missouri; and Cincinnati, Ohio.
In Canada a veterinary school was founded at Toronto in 1862, and four years later another school was established at Montreal. Canada. For some years the Montreal school formed a department of McGill University, but in 1902 the veterinary branch was discontinued. Veterinary instruction in French is given by the faculty of comparative medicine at Laval University. The Canadian Department of Agriculture possesses a fully equipped veterinary sanitary service employing about 400 qualified veterinary surgeons as inspectors of live stock, meat and dairy produce.
In the Australian commonwealth there is only one veterinary school, which was established in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1888. The Public Health Departments of New South Wales, Australia. Western Australia, Tasmania and the other states employ qualified veterinary surgeons as inspectors of live stock, cowsheds, meat and dairy produce.
There is no veterinary school in New Zealand, but the Department of Agriculture has arranged to establish one at Wellington in connexion with the investigation laboratory and farm New Zealand. of the division of veterinary science at Wallaceville. The government employs about forty qualified veterinarians as inspectors of live stock, abattoirs, meat-works and dairies.
In Egypt a veterinary school with French teachers was founded in 1830 at Abu-Zabel, near Cairo, by Clot Bey, a doctor of medicine. This school was discontinued in 1842. The Public Health Egypt. Department in 1901 established at Cairo a new veterinary school for the instruction of natives. Ten qualified veterinary surgeons are employed in the sanitary service.
Each of the colonies Natal, Cape Colony, Transvaal, Orange River Colony, Swaziland, Bechuanaland and Rhodesia has a veterinary sanitary police service engaged in dealing with the South Africa. contagious diseases of animals. Laboratories for the investigation of disease and the preparation of antitoxins and protective sera have been established at Grahamstown, Pretoria and Pietermaritzburg.
Characteristics of Veterinary Medicine.
Veterinary medicine has been far less exposed to the vagaries of theoretical doctrines and systems than human medicine. The explanation may perhaps be that the successful practice of this branch of medicine more clearly than in any other depends upon the careful observation of facts and the rational deductions to be made therefrom. No special doctrines seem, in later times at least, to have been adopted, and the dominating sentiment in regard to disease and its treatment has been a medical eclecticism, based on practical experience and anatomico-pathological investigation, rarely indeed on philosophical or abstract theories. In this way veterinary science has become pre-eminently a science of observation. At times indeed it has to some extent been influenced by the doctrines which have controlled the practice of human medicine—such as those of Broussais, Hahnemann, Brown, Rasori, Rademacher and others—yet this has not been for long: experience of them when tested upon dumb unimaginative animals soon exposed their fallacies and compelled their discontinuance.
Of more moment than the cure of disease is its prevention, and this is now considered the most important object in connexion with veterinary science. More especially is this the case with those contagious disorders that depend for their existence and extension upon the presence of an infecting agent, and whose ravages for so many centuries are written largely in the history of civilization. Every advance made in human medicine affects the progress of veterinary science, and the invaluable investigations of Davaine, Pasteur, Chauveau, Lister and Koch have created as great a revolution in veterinary practice as in the medicine of man. In "preventive medicine" the benefits derived from the application of the germ theory are now realized to be immense; and the sanitary police measures based on this knowledge, if carried rigorously into operation, must eventually lead to the extinction of animal plagues. Bacteriology has thrown much light on the nature, diagnosis and, cure of disease both in man and animals, and it has developed the beneficent practice of aseptic and antiseptic surgery, enabling the practitioner to prevent exhausting suppuration and wound infection with its attendant septic fever, to ensure the rapid healing of wounds, and to undertake the more serious operations with greater confidence of a successful result.
The medicine of the lower animals differs from that of man in no particular so much, perhaps, as in the application it makes of utilitarian principles. The life of man is sacred; but in the case of animals, when there are doubts as to complete restoration to health or usefulness, pecuniary considerations generally decide against the adoption of remedial measures. This feature in the medicine of domesticated animals brings very prominently before us the value of the old adage that "prevention is better than cure." In Great Britain the value of
